Could We Run Modern Society on Human Power Alone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/05/could-we-run-modern-society-on-human-power-alone.html <comment><USER2> This will never, ever make economic sense. Human labor is orders of magnitude too valuable to waste on power generation. A fit man can, in an hour, produce about 400 watt-hours of electricity, worth about $0.05; his labor would be worth at least $10 in a developed country. In the unlikely event that all modern technology ceased to exist, we would revert to using animals and wood for power, like they did in the 1700s.

<comment><USER3> Someone producing 400W for an hour is not a fit man, it's a star endurance athlete. It's the kind of power top performer in tour de France can provide.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. At a local nuclear power station there's a visitor center where one can experiment how to generate electricity with an exercise bike. With moderate power you can power a tablet computer or an incandescent light bulb, but the water kettle comes on only with actual athletes, and even then, the small light bulb goes off, and even a professional cyclist can't sustain that power for longer than a brief moment.

It's just pointless to generate electricity by human power. It's not pointless to ride a bike.

<comment><USER5> Yes, as a benchmark an 80kg male rider that's an athlete but not a pro (say cat1 or cat2) can produce maybe 1200-1300 watts for 10 seconds, and maybe 400 watts or so for 5 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think people are missing the fact this is being run by an art collective. It is trying to ask questions and show what sort of compromises people might _need_ to make if/when other energy sources are off the table. I love it.

<comment><USER7> > when other energy sources are off the table

Hu? Where do you [they] think the human power comes from? It comes from food - you could just burn those plants for fuel, and skip the useless multiple conversion.

What does flowing the energy through a human accomplish? It certainly doesn't change the energy source.

<comment><USER6> I understand the Haber process. I don't think most people know of or care about it. The point their making here is without the magic of current energy supplies things get very weird and difficult, even then you try really hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Most work, however, we carried out ourselves."

"a human needs to be motivated in order to produce energy."

Historically, "ourselves" was equivalent to "members of a disfavored ethnic group and/or social class" and the "motivation" was provided by guys with swords, whips, pistols, etc.

I'd rather not see routine slavery/serfdom come back, thanks.

<comment><USER9> They specifically address your point; you didn't read it.

<comment><USER10> But they don't, unless I missed it, address the death toll of large-scale, human-powered construction projects like the Panama Canal (5,609 dead). To me it reads like a romanticization of brutal working conditions, and waving aside the issue of slavery by saying "but we can make it fun!" doesn't really help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >If students have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How far would students go to reduce their efforts? Would hot showers go out of fashion?

The article's discussion of human power and incentives to use it beg the point to be made about the right way to fix the tragedy of the commons market failure with atmospheric pollution (and all the other problems with fossil fuels as well).

There are so many ways to reduce energy consumption that government regulation can't possibly legislate and adequately regulate (and it's barely even trying at the moment).

For example, I try to make a point to bike, walk, take the stairs, use efficient driving habits, and try to often take cold showers. I admittedly do this primarily because I like the exercise, the cold water is more refreshing and better for my skin, I save money, but as as an added bonus I feel some satisfaction that I consume less fossil fuels. But I would do all these things more if I saved more money from it.

And taxing bad things is better than taxing good things (like income and investment).

I think this is one of the things we will look back from the future and think, what were people thinking--they taxed jobs when they could have taxed something like environmental destruction? What?

But American politics are what they are. Our public transport across the country varies, but generally it is laughably bad, and that's just another example of an extremely low hanging fruit to grab.

<comment><USER4> The tragedy of taxing bad things is that if the taxation works, and the bad things (e.g. pollution) start to go away, then the government loses tax revenue. And for the government, that's worse than any pollution.

So we see all governments going through loops and hoops to tax something bad, and at the same time regulate so that a sufficient amount of that bad thing still happens so they wouldn't lose the tax money.

<comment><USER12> Of course, this can be limited by requiring funds for a specific purpose, such as mitigating pollution. While far from perfect, gas tax going to pay for roads is a decent feedback loop.

Tax 'bad' thing, to pay for education about or mitigation of 'bad' thing. the feedback loop solves itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pff, "modern society". Most hunting populations have been calculated to yield 10kcals of food for every 1kcal of expenditure --- our fancy modern fuels OTOH result in more like 1kcal food yield per (non-edible of course) 10kcal expenditure. Not exact figures of course but the difference is _that_ profound. "Human power" thus "wins", then --- but not to "run modern society", of course.

<comment><USER14> That doesn't seem right - surely a modern animal farm yields more food per energy expended than a group of hunters?

<comment><USER15> Anthropology classes teach that the parent comment is true: hunter-gatherer societies are much more energy efficient. Every step of modernization, from animal to machine power, decreases energy efficiency but increases _intensity_ : food can be made more quickly and in less space. Consider that animals are more powerful, but require food and water of their own. Tractors are more powerful still, but require fuel, steel, and huge industries that bring those two together.

The best citation I have off hand is this [https://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/courses/wucrsl/L48/361...](https://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/courses/wucrsl/L48/361/FL2017)

<comment><USER16> It does make sense when you consider where the energy all comes from: the sun.

Plants absorb solar energy and store it as chemical energy. Animals roam far and wide to eat those plants, collecting the chemical energy in one place- themselves. Then human hunters come along and simply 'pick' the energy from the dense source that is the animal.

Now, the humans don't need to do much work because the energy is all in one place (they just need to _find_ that one place). But the energy itself was collected over a huge area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes of course.

Rick and Morty covered that in this episode.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w)

<comment><USER18> And Black Mirror too.

<comment><USER19> Referring to the episode "Fifteen Million Merits". IMO it's one of the greatest dystopian works ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > For extra motivation, all exercise machines in our prototype human power > plant are facing a jacuzzi & shower where girls are invited to encourage the > boys to flex their muscles and generate more power. Of course, the gender > roles could be reversed, but during the first experiments we discovered that > this is less energy-efficient. Girls don't seem to get motivated by guys in > jacuzzis, at least not to the extent that guys get motivated by girls in > jacuzzis.

Clever, but I'm guessing many will find this creepy or 'problematic'.

<comment><USER21> I don't see how acknowledging and using differences in psychology between men and women would be problematic. Could you please explain why you believe it would be?

<comment><USER22> To the extent they are describing observed behavior, it's not problematic. However, stating generalizations in a flip, cliche-confirming way _can_ be problematic, inasmuch as it reinforces the negative stereotypes.

In this particular example, I certainly have no problem believing that it's true that among contemporary college-aged individuals from American and European cultural traditions, that on average the men would be more motivated to work out harder by the chance to see scantily clad women in a jacuzzi than the reverse. But that's extremely unlikely to be true for _all_ men or _all_ women. I would doubt that it's true for homosexual individuals. I would doubt that it's true for people raised in cultures that aren't so open to the display and ogling of near-naked humans, or contrariwise, cultures wherein the display of near-naked human form is not so sexualized.

This statement would be a cute aside between two people who share a similar cultural background. But in a semi-scientific article describing a utopian vision of power generation, it feels out of place to me.

From a global point of view, it's narrow-minded. The generalization given is not true of all cultures. From an individual point of view, generalizations about men and women who do share our culture tell us nothing about the individual in front of our face, who may or may not personally fit in with the profile. From a camaraderie-building point of view for residents of the building, making decisions about how to run the residents' responsibilities based on sexual objectification of other residents is probably not going to build a healthy local culture. And from a purely practical point of view, ignoring individual preferences and motivations is a great way to get substandard performance from everyone. Maybe the chance to see the girls in the jacuzzi would motivate the guys more than the girls, but I am betting it's unlikely to be the best strategy to get the best performance out of each individual man and woman.

The point is, it's a mistake to embrace these generalizations as universal truisms. They are anything but. And relying on them leads you to make poor and sometimes hurtful assumptions about other people.

<comment><USER21> The poster isn't talking about absolute truisms, but generalities. And generally, men tend to be less selective towards their mates than women due to sexual dimorphism. And yes, those differences extend into psychology[1]. Acting like there are no norms between the sexes in an attempt to placate those outside the norm goes too far. Yes, we need to be accepting of those who aren't normal, but that doesn't mean we need to ostracize the majority of normal people in the process.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Each student in the human powered Van Unnik student building is responsible > for generating the electricity that's used in his or her individual room.

No elderly or physically disabled students need apply.

<comment><USER19> You think it's eevil for people to generate their own power, because not everyone can do it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Makes sense that they'd try this in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a _very_ high mode share of active transportation (walk/bike). For example, the walk+bike mode share in Amsterdam is 56% (chart includes other cities in Europe): [https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed](https://charts.datawrapper.de/JsIir/index.html#embed)

By contrast, most US cities are well under 10%. Even LA, which has pretty excellent weather overall, is only at 4%: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share)

<comment><USER24> LA is a bad example, as it's also notoriously a car-centric city that is unfriendly to walkers/bikers. Better example would be something like Portland.

<comment><USER20> > a car-centric city that is unfriendly to walkers/bikers

1\. This is true of nearly all cities in the US, and

2\. This feeds into my point about cultures favoring physical activity or not. LA's geography/weather is great for walking and biking. What holds it back are intentional design decisions borne out of culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The post-global-warmjng sci fi novel The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi deals with this scenario: all energy is measured in calories and workers prepare clockwork springs that store energy to power devices. It's a great novel, too.

<comment><USER26> Which is wildly unrealistic of course. There's no material that can take the tension such springs would have to cope with. Lots of SF books ask you to take one or two impossible things as givens in order to tell the story of course, but this one pushed things a little far for me.

The repeated "lets rape the sex bot again" scenes didn't help either. Funny how when she gets her revenge, that's not described at all, just the aftermath. But we get page after page of lascivious detail on her abuse. Frankly, it left a really bad taste & I didn't want to read anything by the author in question ever again.

<comment><USER27> The very technology of the spring winding is a McGuffin in the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> well, no: unless the whole campus is also built without machinery, you're trading upfront energy (building with more insulation, building the additional power storage retrieval distribution system etc) with the ability to sustain the building with low energy later on

also, James May tried to plug gym machinery to an electric car, the human output is just too low for electrical appliances - think not laptops, but washing machines, vacuum cleaners etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> Once you get past the point of "energy I would have expended anyway for exercise/to relieve boredom" you run into the fact that humans just aren't a very good way of converting resources (food and the energy/minerals needed to grow it) into mechanical energy.

The modern food system is woefully inefficient at converting primary energy into food calories and the human body isn't all that great at it converting food into mechanical work. Useful amounts of heat are even more elusive. Toasting a slice of bread might take a half hour of vigorous exercise.

I'm pretty sure it would take more energy to heat a jacuzzi than one could extract from a dozen people showing off in front of it.

</comment><comment><USER29> What this misses is that we don't really have any way of "generating" power aside from nuclear reactions.

It's all converting from one form to another. In the case of "human power" it's extracting energy from plants and animals that we kill.

Wait but Why has an excellent deep dive on this: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your- lif...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your- life.html#part1)

</comment><comment><USER30> from the perspective of an engineer this is stupid. humans can not generate anywhere near the power we consume currently. if you want to experience life as a 5th century serf go ahead

</comment><comment><USER31> You can motivate people to do manual labor a lot of ways, but this does not mean they will like it. Fear of death is a good motivator. "Hey, let's have fun working out!" is not a good motivator.

On top of this, the premise is crazy. They want to have two societies: one that produces technology with non-human-generated power so the other society can use that technology to live on human-generated power.

</comment><comment><USER32> One of the more thought-provoking articles I've read in a long time.

If you think they're dreaming, I suggest reading it nor for engineering detail, but to try out their perspective. Most people would answer 'no,' leave it at that, and not reach some interesting perspectives they did.

Not that it goes into engineering detail, but for the creativity, thoughtfulness, and, most importantly, change in perspective from the predominant views of: we must produce more power! ... we must not change our way of looking at things!

I use my rowing machine regularly, which creates resistance through a fan and wind resistance. If it used a generator, I could power most of my apartment's electrical needs. Maybe not my refrigerator, which I shouldn't use when it's cold outside. Most of my electrical bill is fixed costs and taxes, not my electrical use, so a little less power and I could drop my contract. Articles like this one get me thinking that way.

If you keep extending how little you can use and what the world would be like if we had to work for our power instead of lazily flicking a switch and not caring about externalities, it's very interesting. Not to mention what it would do to our declining physical fitness, growing obesity, increasing disconnect from nature, and probably mental fitness too.

I bought a hand-powered washing machine a while ago and it did the job fine until it broke. Sadly, our culture doesn't promote great solutions that reduce consumption. I'd be happy to wash my clothes under my own power and other things like that if well-built ones were available. I can solve some things myself, but it's a lot easier when solutions are on sale. There are thousands of options for plug-in washing machines and only one or two hand or foot powered.

I'd love to see people engineer solutions that work and endure. This article isn't trying to solve all global power problems, but I bet its authors feel something like Stallman when he started writing GNU utilities, which people probably saw as tilting at windmills. Or even Torvalds writing the kernel, though Stallman's platform made his project more plausible to help. By the time people started Wikipedia, they could look back and build on several successful models. Or maybe like Feynman considering how much room there was at the bottom. Contemporaries probably said they were crazy and didn't see the point.

I, for one, support people thinking along these lines and seeing how far they can take us -- beyond engineering solutions to new ways of thinking about ourselves in the context of nature. I bet a lot further than most of us suspect.

<comment><USER33> if you keep extending how little you can use the answer is obviously yes, but then it isn't modern society. you could.more efficiently harness the sun than growomg plants and eating them then working out anyway, so this whole approach fails to make sense at any level.

</comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron How much energy would that same human provide when dried, burned and used as heat energy to power a turbine?

I mean, I ask for no other reason than curiosity.

<comment><USER29> About 70 kWh.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/)

(Hey, you're the one that asked)

<comment> King-Aaron There truly is an XKCD for everything

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> No</comment>


How to Eavesdrop on a Former NSA Chief on a Train - <AUTHOR> http://www.onthemedia.org/story/eavesdropping-former-nsa-head-amtrak/

<comment><USER2> Nice example of the power of citizenry, and that even officials are people too, but I really hope this doesn't set a precedent for all of us reporting on everything someone we're interested in does/says.

The way to fight spying is to build better methods of communication and fight for privacy rights, not turn into an NSA paparazzi.

Still, very cool story, well told.

<comment><USER3> Those pesky kids and their computers....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Happy Ending!</comment>


PyTorch based Deep Learning MOOC - <AUTHOR> http://course.fast.ai/lessons/lessons.html <comment><USER2> I'm guessing this is the new pytorch based version of part 1? Been waiting for this to be released so I'm pretty excited.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is! They just recently replaced the old videos with the updated content. Best of luck!</comment></comment>


You Know Where Else It's Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/11/mahalo-facebook-calacanis/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have to admire how quickly he responded in the comments.</comment>


Omniscient JavaScript Debugging in Pernosco - <AUTHOR> https://robert.ocallahan.org/2020/05/omniscient-js-debugging-in-pernosco.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is really exciting; I wonder if nodejs works too?

<comment><USER2> It does. We actually started with NodeJS because a simple NodeJS testcase is much smaller than Chromium :-).

<comment><AUTHOR> Score!</comment></comment></comment>


List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

<comment><USER2> I admire the stick-to-it-ness of the people who have multiple predictions on the list.

Hal Lindsey, Pat Robertson, Ronald Weinland, Hon-Ming Chen, et al.. Shine on you crazy diamonds!

<comment><USER3> Made the tables sortable. Makes it easy to see who made multiple failed predictions..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm, some of these are likely to prove to be correct (the last three).</comment>


Leading with Wikipedia: A brand proposal for 2030 - <AUTHOR> https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/02/26/leading-with-wikipedia-a-brand-proposal-for-2030/ <comment><USER2> Contrarily to the negative sentiment expressed so far in the comments, I find branding an important question:

If a foundation does good work, you'd want the foundation to receive more money to do more good work.

For example, Wikipedia would benefit from many more tech investments, for example in the excellent wiki data and wikimedia research initiatives; or think of wiki vandalism and fake news.

It's well known in the non-profit world (and intuitive) that spending money in marketing does indeed help achieve larger goals in terms of deployed funding.

Beyond funding, the fact that people (hacker news is not a representative sample) don't recognize Wikimedia and the fact that it's responsible for something that is used daily is a problem. It detracts from the project and removes visibility.

Edit: made it more readable

<comment><USER3> I would much prefer them to stay small, tight, and focused.

<comment><USER4> If only the Mozilla Foundation had a similar preference...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I spent over four years as an engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, which trained me to expect the double-take most people do when they hear the name for the first time. They either think they misheard you, or worse: they think you represent a knock-off entity that is trading on a misleading brand similarity, and they squint at you with suspicion. It's as if you told them you work at "AmaZone". So you can immediately forget about any bragging rights. The conversation has barely started and you are already at a trust deficit.

It's almost worse when the other party has heard of Wikimedia, because then your (by-now rehearsed) introduction comes across as wooden and weirdly defensive.

And if you think all that is bad... the annual conference for the Wikimedia community is called _Wikimania_. Try explaining _that_ to passport control.

<comment><USER6> I have a friend working at Canonical, and whenever he introduces himself he always includes a brief mention that Canonical makes Ubuntu. I felt it's very strange (and certainly felt it a little offensive when I first knew him), but came to understand it after a while. It is _not_ common for people to make connection between Canonical and Ubuntu (even IT people!). He needs to establish himself, otherwise many people won't take him seriously when he talks about Linux stuff. It's quite unfortunate.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if someone working at Alphabet Inc. suffers the same anonymity.

<comment><USER8> Alphabet is only a holding. I wouldn't expect many people to work for Alphabet directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the appeal of getting them to cut costs down to nothing? It seems weird to me that people resent a budget of $70 million/year for the most useful website in existence. What would you rather the money be spent on?

<comment><USER10> The problem, in all this, is not getting _Wikipedia_ 's expenses down to nothing. I use Wikipedia all the time, and I love it. It's an incredibly useful site and should be funded well enough to keep running indefinitely, and even have room for improvement.

On the other hand, if I choose to donate money to Wikmedia, 80% of it goes to other places, like their "content" sites, which consists of this bunch of mediocrity:

Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Wikidata.

I don't give a shit about any of these projects, the only one I _really_ don't want to go away is Wikipedia, and the rest could die and I wouldn't even blink, except as those projects also support Wikipedia. Increase Wikipedia's expenses if you must! Double it! Triple it! Just don't pretend that the foundation is struggling to support the thing that most people donating actually care about.

<comment> DC-3 Anecdote warning - I have been studying Old English this year and have found Wiktionary invaluable.

<comment><USER10> I think it's great that Wiktionary is a good resource for you!

Hearing things like this only makes me with _more_ that people could donate to individual projects and not the WMF at large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing that depresses me the most about Wiki[mp]edia is that the US$ 100 that I donated to them a few years ago (presumably,) predominantly went into creating material like this.

Given how incredibly well-funded Wikimedia is, their yearly extort^Wdonation- drive with 50%+ viewport-sized banners plastered all over Wikipedia, claiming that the encyclopedia you're viewing is in dire need of your money to barely sustain itself for the rest of the year, actually makes me rather angry every time I see it.

Recommended reading for those unaware of how (and what) Wikimedia is actually doing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-27/Op- ed)

<comment><USER12> They're only well-funded for now. That funding can go away if enough people, such as yourself, complain about this. They need to sustain themselves, just like any other organization. If they are a net negative in the world, I would withhold donations. For producing material like this? It's still a net positive and therefore still worthy of donating to.

<comment><USER13> The foundation has so much money that they could fully sustain themselves just from their endowment if they wanted to. They really do not need donations from the public and their petitions for money are misleading for the majority of people, who think they are helping to pay for editors (free) and server costs (minor costs).

<comment><USER14> They have enough cash to safely operate for one year roughly with current expenses, without new contributions. I'm not sure where you're getting that they can free-stand just on their foundation's financial position.

Expenses were $81.4 million in 2018 (up from $69m in 2017). Cash is $73.9m (up from $49.5m). Wages were $38.5m.

Here is their audited 2017-2018 financial report [PDF]:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wikipedia is well known _as an encyclopedia_.

Changing that name to encompass a project which is quite different will be detrimental.

<comment><USER16> They are talking about changing the company's name behind Wikipedia to have the same name as the product.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, no more different than the company Google having the search engine also called Google. (yes, I know it's technically called Google Search, but no, for all practical uses, it isn't)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _while shortening "Wikimedia Commons" to its nickname "Wikicommons"_

Literally never seen anyone write "Wikicommons", in all the years I've heard people talk about Commons, but heh.

I don't really understand how they manage to (in my opinion) waste time on nonsense like this. The services run great, the contribution volume is immense, and the quality of the tools is improving constantly. I want the Wikimedia Foundation's treasury to keep more funds to deal with conditions which may arise, and seek donations when they expect the most success (rather than the most desperation).

I want the Wikimedia Foundation to make it as attractive and convenient as possible for all interested persons to contribute to, and access, this immense cultural resource, but basically nothing else; and I just don't see how messing about with the names is an efficient way to carry out that job.

<comment><USER19> If this were to go through, they should just make WC be called "Wikimedia." Wikipedia is a wiki encyclopedia, Wikimedia should be a wiki of media. What is a wiki of a commons?

<comment><USER20> So you're suggesting reusing a brand they've already used in the past except with a totally different meaning? And that will be less confusing?

<comment><USER18> I think morpheuskafka is saying that if they are going to reuse a brand, as is already proposed, they might as well use the least confusing and silly short name for wikimedia commons he can think of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I get the distinct feeling this is from some busy body with too much free time looking to make an impact...

Change for change's sake is bad. Think of the tech debt.

<comment><USER21> This is essentially about cleaning up debt (though brand debt, rather than technical). Read atdt's comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259543)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> By the way, I feel like I should underline that I consider the technology behind Wikimedia a nice idea, but terrible execution. Apart from it being completely not standardized and having only one implementation, just compare it to Stack Overflow: both have the goal of gathering valuable knowledge and one manages to use gamification to build a healthy and transparent community, while the other has the least intuitive system possible, based on "voting" by editing Wikipedia pages only to end up being reminded that this is not a democracy. I feel that if the process was easier to grasp, people would edit more and we would have even more access to knowledge. Also, not integrating with Wikias sounds like a lost opportunity as well. I know that they vary by scope, but this would better solve the problem of deletionism vs inclusionism than what we have right now - criteria of "notability" in order to... reduce noise? Reduce maintenance cost? Neither is convincing to me.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a very nice brand research project, based on this they obviously had problems. "Wikimedia is a Social Media Video site" is a quote from the research. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Global_W...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Global_Wikipedia_and_Wikimedia_Brand_Research_Report.pdf)

<comment><USER24> How much researchers should they hire to understand writing everything in blue is ugly? You can create and maintain a brand image without going ridiculous like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a great idea! It's honestly long overdue

</comment><comment><USER26> Okay. Makes sense to me.

Now what are you going to do about busybody deletionists with power driving away every single new contributor - and most of the old ones?

</comment><comment><USER27> This seems like a narrowly thought out proposal. Contrary to what Wikimedia may think and see today, Wikipedia is not the future. The future is something closer to robotopedia or machinepedia or autowikipedia, if you get what I'm saying. The name Wikimedia is fine.

I have seen the future, and there is no place for human writers in it.

<comment><USER28> > The future is something closer to robotopedia or machinepedia, if you get > what I'm saying

Can't disagree with that enough. Wikipedia owes its incredible quality to the human editors doing thankless work behind the scenes. A machine-driven alternative would be awful.

<comment><USER29> As long as machine writing is below human level quality, yes.

But that won't be the case for too many more years.

<comment><USER28> I'm not convinced of that. It feels very much like self driving cars: people look back 5 years, see X amount of progress, and assume that at least X amount more will be done 5 years from now. Reality rarely tracks that way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trouble with Disruptive Change - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=2829&tag=homeCar

<comment><USER2> 496 year old repost?

``It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had the actual experience of it.'' \- Niccolò Machiavelli

But seriously, it's not like this is a new or previously unknown phenomenon. This is just a fluff piece from a fluff site.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely not an earth shattering message and most certainly nothing that we have not intuitively known based on our prior life experiences. But what is profound about this post is that your perspective is different today, then when you first had this thought or read something like this in the past. Our perspectives change in second, which enables us to have a different interpretation of the same experience regardless of the amount of time since the initial occurrence took place. These are the types of messages that need to echo, loud and clear, because their underlying meaning could never be heard enough...

The quote by Niccolò Machiavelli is incredible!

<comment><USER2> You know what? That is an excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> From the article:

> _Baron and Hannan found that companies founded with a commitment model for > managing their people were more likely to reach an initial public offering > or be acquired at a good price and were much less likely to fail than > companies managing their people using other approaches. But — and this is > what's important — companies that shifted to this more effective way of > managing people were actually more likely to fail than companies than had > begun with a different, less effective way of managing but stayed with it._

> _That's because the benefits of changing to a better way of doing things did > not outweigh the disruptive consequences of the transition._

Nice. Confusing causation with correlation in one sentence.

</comment><comment><USER4> From the article:

> A new chef at the highly rated San Francisco restaurant Ducca decided to > make his mark by adding chili to some pasta dishes and grapes to others — > with bad results.

I can't say anything about this specific restaurant, but this statement seems like it could just as easily be considered an opinion rather than treated as a fact.

Another consideration is that one leader may be highly skilled in a given trait while anther leader has a completely different core set of traits which force change to take place when there is a change of leadership. Changes in leadership style are typically changes that reflect the competency range of one leader compared to another.

Politics is especially filled with the sort of criticism that changes are being made "for the sake of change" so that someone can challenge if the change is meaningful, because there is no perceived value of that change to a person who disagrees with the change.

I don't know how this could even be quantified, but I disagree with the assumption that changes are typically made simply "for the sake of change".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting concept because it dives into the human psychology of feeling important regardless of the ramifications. When leaders take on a new role within an organization, they feel the desire to create their legacy and are often disruptive to something that is already working efficiently. I personally believe that the most profound influence is the result of the smallest change. Legacy's are born because people were willing to do what has never been done before and more often than not, what they do, is not too drastic.</comment>


Will Initial Coin Offerings Fund the Future? - <AUTHOR> http://versionone.vc/will-initial-coin-offerings-fund-future/ <comment><USER2> The term ICO is horribly misleading. It sounds like IPO, which generally is a liquidity event that happens after a company has become established. An ICO happens before there is a company or business, in any meaningful sense. But there is one similarity -- like an IPO, the sellers in an ICO are immediately liquid. What could go wrong?

<comment><USER3> The aren't necessarily liquid for the full amount. It's possible to make a smart contract that doles out the funds over time, or even lets contributors vote on releasing funds.

Plus it's fairly standard to award the creators some of the new tokens, with a vesting period of at least a year. The general idea is to used the raised funds for development/marketing/etc, and the tokens as the reward; if the project fails, the token will be worthless, so there's a strong incentive to work at least until they can sell off the tokens.

<comment><USER2> OK, yes -- there are many cool technical possibilities. And per the other commenter above, it's not as if this is any less rigorous than an average seed round. OK, but when you have people investing multiple millions at a 100mm+ valuation, on an unproven team (and this is a charitable description in many cases), pre-product, there is a risk that the opportunity is being mispriced. There is a conflict -- on one hand, an ICO is "fairer" to developers in that they receive immediate compensation, and a larger share of the opportunity for the work they are doing. On the other hand, this mechanic is highly prone to fraud and abuse.

<comment><USER3> I agree that some of the valuations are crazy. But that's not unique to crypto. The same thing happened in the dotcom era.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the article: "Note that most of these ICO-funded projects have not publicly launched yet." They probably took the money and ran.

The "DAO" crowd never delivered their Internet-enabled door lock, after two years of hype. (If you want an Internet-enabled door lock, most of the big lock manufacturers offer one.)

<comment><USER5> Er, TheDAO failed, but because of the hack that caused Ethereum hard fork and the return of money to the original investors. The founders of Slock.IT never received a dime.

While I was never a fan of the lock, TheDAO was an investment fund - there was a forum with a few other prospective proposals, and they had some amazing ideas regarding the funds' governance. There are some other, similar, funds in the works now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fraud fraud fraud. These are 99% pump and dump schemes.

<comment><USER7> This is true [1] but does this matter if even only 1% is incredibly innovative and world changing? I think a limited number of these will almost certainly be successful operations.

That said, I do not plan to invest in anything beyond ETH (ethereum currency) because I have low confidence in most of these ICOs and it's hard to pick out the right ones.

[1] It's true most of these are hare-brained schemes by people hopelessly over their heads, including a fair number that are scammy. However, given how little most of these promise (beyond saying something along the lines of "we're building X and if people use it there will be an automatic payout to coin holders") I think it's unfair and close-minded to just label them all "frauds" a priori- Something can't be a fraud if no one is lying- Terms like "pump and dump" and "scam" for some of these I think is fair though.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it does matter, nobody is going to trust the one honest guy when the 99 others are looking to rip you off for as much as they can carry.

Distrust and inability to ascertain quality before purchase drives out all the honest players from the market.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_lemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_lemons)

<comment><USER5> While I agree that 95% of ICOs are not so good, so are 95% of e-mails in my Inbox.

With ICOs, there are quite a few ways to ascertain the quality - regular due diligence applies, even more so when there are so many eyes watching every proposal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bad actors don't invalidate the technology or the opportunities it brings about.

ICOs open access to funding to companies outside the usual VC-preferred areas and sectors. They also allow pretty much everyone to invest (though the ones that follow regulation tend to disallow participants from US that are not registered with the SEC).

<comment><USER10> The complete idiom is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch", which is the opposite of the point you're trying to make here.

<comment><USER9> Point taken, edited to say bad actors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sec will put a stop to these at some point. Probably sooner then later.

<comment><USER12> This is a global phenomenon, not just happening in the US.

How would they enforce it?

<comment><USER13> Who has jurisdiction over a functioning DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Corporation/Organization)?

<comment><USER14> I would ask: who wrote the DAO code? Someone (or several people) tested, developed and then deployed the code.

<comment><USER5> So did the authors of Linux, and nobody is chasing them when a hack appears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Will scam coins fund the future?

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER17> Whether or not it's entirely true, this is a good link to click.</comment></comment>


Realtime client push as a service - powered by HTML5 websockets - <AUTHOR> http://pusherapp.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, but the playable demo didn't work in my env :-(</comment>


How the Pentagon's payroll quagmire traps America's soldiers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/09/us-usa-pentagon-payerrors-special-report-idUSBRE96818I20130709 <comment><USER2> This is both awful, somehow unsurprising, and COBOL is a piss poor scapegoat.

I've talked on here in the past about how crazy it is that some of my customers had huge financial systems that were written in COBOL, quietly still plugging away.

The most important of which is a system which processes billions of dollars of transactions a day, and has done so since the early 70's (when they purchased the what was then off-the-shelf software). You can imagine what a maintenance nightmare it must be (both because it's old, very important, and written in a programming language which predates the cotton gin).

Assuming that they can't just rewrite the system (which might be a reality), they can certainly sit down a bunch of developers and have them learn COBOL. COBOL isn't even a particularly difficult language, we were writing pretty decently-sized programs after a few months in high school (and if the system is that old, it's probably not even using any fancy language features).

If only the military had some means by which they could take people without past exposure to some skillset and train them to be competent at that skillset. Maybe part of that training could involve having to climb over a wall, or some sort of rope course.

<comment><USER3> It might not even be an issue of training COBOL programmers. I'm aware of more than one large-scale legacy system that people "somehow" lost the source code for.

Which means fixing bugs means disassembly, hot patching, and keeping your fingers crossed. And if you're lucky and the place is incapable of learning, they'll then lose all documentation for the patch, too. Fixing anything is a nightmare. On the upside, if you can stomach it, there are _nice_ consulting fees to be had.

(I'm not aware if the Pentagon lost source code - my experience is with civilian systems)

<comment><USER4> > Which means fixing bugs means disassembly, hot patching, and keeping your > fingers crossed.

This sounds like something with extremely high overhead, that would benefit from scale. That is to say, instead of trying to reverse-engineer and patch each module every time you need to make a change, just:

1\. run the entire project through a decompiler, making sure that each generated code file on its own recompiles to something that works when linked back together with the rest of the existing modules;

2\. and then use that decompiled result as the new codebase, and start refactoring.

<comment><USER3> In a reasonable world, yes. In a world where IT is a cost center, this is what happens:

1) People work around it as much as possible.

2) When the pain is unbearable, you bring in a high-priced consultant, because your engineers say something about "recompile" and "refactor". Which you as VP don't understand, are scared of, and are not willing to spend the money on.

3) The consultant puts in a week or so to hack things together. It's much cheaper than the recompile/refactor thing, and so you as VP are a hero to your bosses.

4) Since the consultant is paid hourly, documentation seems kind of pricey. Let's skip that.

5) Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I _wish_ this was just Dilbert, but in quite a few companies, that's reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Problems with pay were one of the primary reasons I didn't reenlist. This was an issue in the 80's. I lost days of personal time talking to yeomen, chiefs and officers just because every other check was late or missing. Turned out for the best, since I would have ended up on the USS Stark since my current ship was going to be decommissioned.

<comment><USER6> For those who don't remember, this is what happened to the USS Stark in 1987:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_(FFG-31)#Missile_att...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_\(FFG-31\)#Missile_attack)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Readers may be interested that Britain's joint armed forces pay system, part of JPA (Joint Personnel Admin) is also recognised to be something of a clusterfuck (although not quite as bad now as it was back when it arrived), dragging in its wake myriad unlucky sods who found themselves paid incorrectly and struggled to get anything fixed, including an RAF chap who ended up simply suing the MOD for the money they owed him but found themselves unable to actually give him.

JPA was put together principally by the no-longer existent EDS, whose reputation for being able to handle large complex systems is well known in the industry.

It's worth mentioning that in the industry, smart cookies recognise that payroll is very much a wicked problem, and payroll for something as complicated as the armed forces is massively complex.

Less smart cookies do not recognise this and routinely massively underestimate the work involved and the support required.

<comment><USER8> Technically EDS still exist - they were bought out by HP and are now HP's Enterprise Services division. Their reputation was also entirely deserved.

<comment><USER9> We have HP contracted support at work (formerly EDS). We call them alternatively Helpless People, Hopeless People or High-Priced People.

<comment><USER10> I had a similar experience with Accenture. We called them Accidenture...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It makes me furious that no one bats an eye at spending a BILLION dollars on a single presidential campaign but they can't sort out pay and benefits for our armed forces and veterans.

Surely a team with a background in large systems could take a set of requirements and produce a working system in 12-18 months.

<comment><USER12> > could take a set of requirements

I think that's the key problem: nobody has a complete big-picture idea of what the program is doing. Sure, there are people in each service branch that are familiar with subsets of the overall technology, but I suspect that at the overlap of these subsets there is significant disagreement over interpretation & implementation that has never become a visible problem because nobody runs consistency checks.

Since compiling the mutually contradictory payroll policies into a non- probabilistic master policy would immediately shed light on these issues, it would be a political minefield. Every choice you make would be the wrong choice and nobody is simultaneously high enough on the totem pole to say "live with it" and low enough on the totem pole to actually implement it.

<comment><USER13> Paychex seems to handle payroll policies for a huge range of businesses without too much trouble. Also I'm not quite sure why the DoD would have several different payroll policies? It seems like everything is determined by the relevant laws, similar to how you can look up the pay frequency and amount of pretty much any pay grade.

<comment><USER14> Laws often say things like 'significant' which are generally interpreted at the agency level. The DoD has a lot of agency's so these interpretations are unlikely to line up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6022247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6022247)

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought that I read this article here once before... But a search turned up nothing relevant.

The story pisses me off to no end. The fucking Pentagon pisses away TRILLIONS of dollars yet they can't even get deserving soldiers their just pay?

It's completely unacceptable!

Take money from the NSA to pay these people.

</comment><comment><USER17> this made me think of an editorial I read during the Iraq war (maybe someone else will remember the author's name).

The author was a university professor who was urging his son not to join the military. One of the points he made is that if his son was injured the military would not take care of him. It was tragic ... the son ended up joining anyway and was killed in Iraq. I remember feeling like shit when that happened. Just kept thinking how awful the Dad must have felt.

I can't quite remember the fathers name .. but I'm pretty sure it was Scandinavian. I keep thinking Uwe S.....?

</comment><comment><USER18> Two things are striking: \- The amounts under debate are small \- The DFAS agency's budget is huge (1.36B)

Why not eliminate the agency altogether? If we divide $1.36B by the number of active military members 1,429,995, that results in $951 / active military personnel.

If we assume payment issues happen to 10% of the military, then that means we can just institute a rule that would give every soldier up to $9,510 in free "payment error insurance."

But I guess having a government body of 12,000 people with the task of giving soldiers a hard time makes more sense to some federal bureaucrat.

<comment><USER19> > If we assume payment issues happen to 10% of the military, then that means > we can just institute a rule that would give every soldier up to $9,510 in > free "payment error insurance."

Sounds like another scandal just waiting to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A sad read indeed. Unfortunately this is not new. No country ever loved there soldier as much as their soldiers loved their country.

I remember reading about pay issues in the roman army when I was at the university. It hasn't changed in 2 000 years. Apparently the roman soldiers experience that their families back home didn't get their pay, and wives was given receipts where there was subtracted xx day for "leave" because their husbands was dead at the time.

We can only speculate if there is any motive and reason her, or only incompetence…

</comment><comment><USER21> > _This agency, with headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, has roughly 12,000 > employees and, after cuts under the federal sequester, a $1.36 billion > budget. It is responsible for accurately paying America 's 2.7 million > active-duty and Reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

It often fails at that task, a Reuters investigation finds._

Ripe for disruption, says I.

</comment><comment><USER22> I heard the same story on NPR a few weeks ago (interview with the reporter): [http://www.npr.org/2013/07/16/202360167/investigation- reveal...](http://www.npr.org/2013/07/16/202360167/investigation-reveals-a- military-payroll-rife-with-glitches)

</comment><comment><USER23> Just imagine Walmarts chief accountant would request 17 billion to modernize the payroll system. The org is of comparable size.

</comment><comment><USER24> Shameful.</comment>


I Don't Make Mistakes. I Use C. - <AUTHOR> http://electronicdesign.com/content2/topic/dont-mistakes-74459/catpath/embedded/seriespath/altembedded-6

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant article - Myths about static analysis. The second myth - <USER2> developers do not make silly mistakes - <http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0116/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I love and use c too.</comment>


Hadi Esmaeilzadeh on Dark Silicon - <AUTHOR> http://intelligence.org/2013/10/21/hadi-esmaeilzadeh-on-dark-silicon/ <comment><USER2> Super long story short (literally, the first question doesn't get answer for something like 1000 words later):

What is dark silicon?

"Dark silicon is the fraction of chip that needs to be powered off at all times due to power constraints."

Long and short is that because of a combo of energy use and heat dissipation at the scale of upcoming transistors, maybe upwards of 50% of the transistors on a chip may need to be off. This then begs the question, why continue developing smaller scales of transistors if the technology can't be utilized because of heat and power needs.

<comment><USER3> Even if you can't power every transistor simultaneously, shrinking allows you to layer on a whole bunch of specialized logic blocks. They're dark almost all the time, and when they're lit up they're displacing much more energy intensive general purpose computation.

Things like hashing/encryption functions, hardware encoders and decoders, even full blown FPGAs are all candidates.

You can also make more, slower cores, running at lower voltage, if you've got any embarrassingly parallel problems to work on.

It's not as attractive as just getting faster and more energy efficient across the board like we have been doing, but there's still room to move there.

<comment><USER4> Specialization is one of the ways forward mentioned in the article. But the ROI in this approach is much lower, and, as the article says, it could not justify the big investments that are required to create a new process.

<comment><USER5> > _it could not justify the big investments that are required to create a new > process._

Not yet, perhaps. New processes are effectively guaranteed to be needed at some point though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" I personally like to see the use of biological nervous tissues for general- purpose computing. Furthermore, using physical properties of devices and building hybrid analog-digital general-purpose computers is extremely enticing."_

Curious how the author doesn't mention the upcoming Memristor [1][2] computing paradigm. Memristor computing will be based upon an entirely different architecture, which will likely revolutionize computing. There is much more to it than I can describe here, but here's at least one company commercializing this tech as we speak [2].

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor)

2\. [http://iopscience.iop.org/0957-4484/24/38/383001/pdf/0957-44...](http://iopscience.iop.org/0957-4484/24/38/383001/pdf/0957-4484_24_38_383001.pdf)

2\. [http://www.crossbar-inc.com/](http://www.crossbar-inc.com/)

<comment><USER7> Entirely different architectures are very _unlikely_ to revolutionize any industry due to path dependence.

<comment><USER8> That path dependence is really an important concept to consider when reflecting about technical standarts, programming languages and frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The actual title of the article is: "Hadi Esmaeilzadeh on Dark Silicon".

The first question of the interviewer is where the (misleading) HN title comes from:

 _Luke Muehlhauser: Could you please explain for our readers what "dark silicon" is, and why it poses a threat to the historical exponential trend in computing performance growth?_

The most interesting part was that to combat this lack of general-purpose performance increase, specialised computing units, fpgas, and Neural Processing Units (NPUs) have been proposed. Linked paper on npus: [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~hadi/doc/paper/2013-toppicks- npu.p...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~hadi/doc/paper/2013-toppicks-npu.pdf) . Linked paper on "an architectural framework from the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) to the microarchitecture, which conventional processors can use to trade accuracy for efficiency." [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~hadi/doc/paper/2012-asplos- truffle...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~hadi/doc/paper/2012-asplos-truffle.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Tl,dr: Two things will cause that chips won't get that much better performance:

\- energy efficiency at transistor level will cause hassles, it doesn't scales down well

\- gains in performance from multiprocessors are smaller than from improving performance of cores

<comment><USER11> News at 11? Sorry for the negative, but isn't this what has been said for a decade now?

<comment><USER12> This whole interview seemed to be an exercise in lengthily recapping well- known things, like how the market for computers is different from the market for paper towels. Presumably the intended audience isn't from the tech industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of the comments here are talking about the perhaps? controversial analysis about processing capability. IMO, That's not really the most important point in this article, for the HN crowd.

It's a long article, so I will sum up what I think is the most important point: we are going to have to think of ways of creating value that no longer leverage exponential deterministic data processing capability. The next venues of profit and growth will be in figuring out how to deal with non- deterministic or open-ended questions where an exact answer is not necessary, or better yet, may not be optimal.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Can you even imagine running out of Microsoft Windows?

This is a particularly poor example: Microsoft controls the supply of Windows licenses and installation media. We have all ran out of Windows 2000 several years back and I don't remember if the supply of Windows XP still exists.

Any free as in speech software would be a better example.

<comment><USER15> Like linux ISOs? Most of the world's bandwidth is used transferring linux ISO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Folks, this is a HUGE problem that will affect our entire industry. There is no replacing an exponential growth function. Sure, we can have a few "one- offs" here and there, but the loss of the exponential growth of computer performance cannot be replaced.

What happens when computers no longer get any faster? People have been so used to the 40 year exponential trend that they can't even comprehend that it will end. We're talking about the next 4-5 years.

<comment><USER17> we're already at the point where ppl don't buy new PCs because they are still fast enough.

getting to the point where silicon development stops and full-on quantum computing begins has been a long time coming. these d-wave machines are still a long ways from a proper quantum computer.

<comment><USER18> There is also the option of alternative substrates, such as graphene, carbon nanotubes or doped diamond.

Diamond could operate at higher temperatures and frequencies (giving us better single-threaded performance again). Graphene would be more suited to the current manufacturing process. I don't know much about nanotube processors other than that they are in research too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't get it -- most of the transistors I administer are off at any given moment, way more than 50% of them. If there's heat-density issues, can't they just pack some nice relatively-cool DRAM and flash around each core and improve my bus bandwidth/latency situation?

<comment><USER20> Controller latency. Hierarchy of all memory and cache has a complexity/memory- size correlation in the controller that directly affects performance. Also, power density in hot-spots is the issue, and fundamentally you want all the fastest switching parts close to each other, which fights any effort to move them apart. There will always be fast-switching, constantly used transistors next to others. Also, at the small scale, the heat has to move linearly to the chip package before it can spread three-dimensionally at all, and it's basically linear at the center of the hot-spot. The heat is going through a straw instead of a block.

Multicore in essence is breaking up the hot spot and spreading it out. Our choices are limited simpler CPU's and more of them to flex this technique. GPU design is more geared toward this, and unified address space on newer AMD chips as well as potentially Nvidia's Tegra design evolution (project Denver?) both point to smaller, simpler CPU's or something like sub-CPU's (instructions are already translated to micro-opcodes and scheduled differently than they appear in the program text) that only do parts of the work instead of operating on whole threads. CPU's are binary code runtimes implemented in hardware, so this kind of abstraction is like changing the runtime without changing the bytecode fed to it. We might end up at a situation where CPU's work on 100 threads with a blurry definition of what a core even is anymore. It will happen slowly, as microprocessors retain major similarities over the years. Convergent evolution and too much engineering and experience to start anything from scratch. Can you find the FPU's in each generation? [http://chip-architect.com/news/AMD_family_pic.jpg](http://chip- architect.com/news/AMD_family_pic.jpg) I always marveled at how much silicon is necessary for SIMD FP.

I somewhat doubt this is relevant at the chip scale, but we're at 10cm per clock cycle at speed-of-light to put the frequency into perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess we need diamond substrate. For real this time.

</comment><comment><USER22> Among the potential solutions, he doesn't mention reversible computing, which I found weird, because the whole point of reversible computing is drastic reduction in power draw.

Maybe he doesn't think it would ever be fast enough, or maybe he thinks it can only apply at really small scales (i.e. nanotech) and there's no smooth incremental path there from where we are now?

<comment><USER23> We're a long way from needing reversible computing, silicon isn't going to get us anywhere near the theoretical efficiency the universe allows us in non- reversible computing. Maybe after we transition to photonics or ballistic electrons or DNA computing or something and plumb that technique to the limits of it's efficiency we can worry about reversible computing. In the mean time, we really only know how to make good computers out of silicon and dark silicon is really only a concern in a silicon context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Dark silicon isn't a problem, it's a partial solution to the real problem, power density.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. To be more specific, it's the end of Dennard scaling. Dark silicon is just a symptom of the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish there was a legal body that could order the author to explain his core thesis in one paragraph.

<comment><USER26> That's called the "dark text problem." ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> i thought this would be about shady startups helping out the dark side. :\

</comment><comment><USER28> I have the solution! Behold:

[http://learnyouahaskell.com/](http://learnyouahaskell.com/)

<comment><USER29> What does this have to do with anything?

<comment><USER28> Well if you read the article to the end (which, granted, is not an easy task) the author finally after a lot meandering reaches the conclusion that you may solve the problem of dark silicon by stopping the increase in clock-speeds while using the increase in transistors to build multiple cores. He then says that this will not result in proportionally higher performance because our software does not run well on multiple cores.

This is where Haskell comes in. Haskell allows you to program in a way that makes parallelization relatively easy.

<comment><USER30> Well for that matter so does Clojure, and both have had a while to pick up traction. Do you think it'll be easier to solve the primarily-social problem of getting traction for languages like that (and I say this as someone who adores Clojure and has some affection for Haskell) or to solve the primarily- technical problem of figuring out chip technologies where one can metaphorically jack up current software and slide the new chip technology in underneath?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's making the difference between a Windows and a OS X user? - <AUTHOR> http://utestme.com/post/6566003951/die-hard

<comment><USER2> > The OS user cheers and hails once a year with every OS update.

"Hurray! They've finally fixed some of the issues I've been having!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's start naming that one OS X feature that was functioning incorrectly and was addressed with Lion. I thought so!</comment></comment>


Craig Newmark's First Notes on Craigslist - <AUTHOR> http://thefastertimes.com/techlife/2010/03/12/craigslist-craig-newmarks-first-notes-from-1995/

<comment><USER2> It would be really cool if the page referenced (<http://www.well.com/www/cnewmark/main.html>) was actually available to view somewhere. Checked the internet archive, I guess it predated it, or was behind a login. Too bad.

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL></comment></comment>


Why I Left the .NET Framework (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/why-i-left-dot-net/ <comment> V-2 Some of this criticism was outdated already, or has gone out of date since.

WebForms (with their underlying concept of abstracting away how web really works) were already in decline two years ago, replaced by MVC.

As a former C# developer, turned Android developer, of course I have to admit there is some walled garden mentality among .NET devs, but I think they get stigmatized for that way more than average. If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it.

Also it's nothing in compare to vitriolic anti-M$ hater mentality, often directed at developers themselves.

Or bizarre anti .NET-bias, case in point: [http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we- dont-...](http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire- net-programmers/) (I'm sure Jon Skeet was devastated).

And what's changed since 2013? Quite a lot: Roslyn... open-sourcing .NET...

<comment><USER2> > If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone > makes such a big deal out of it.

To be fair, Rails is _amazing_ , the most cutting-edge web framework out there, and it's settling into adulthood nicely. The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs. Whatever you could need is right at hand.

The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. He has his own hacked-together solution for his own projects, but most of what he does, he claims source control just doesn't work.

I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs, and so ends up solving no problems really well. People really seem to go gaga over C#, and to be sure the language isn't terrible like C/C++/Java, but it's pretty damn far from being _spectacular_. Ruby isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread either, but one can be enormously productive with it.

<comment><USER3> >The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control.

Well, there you have it, this guy knows a .NET dev who doesn't use legit version control, so the whole .NET stack is a joke. QED.

<comment> V-2 But it proves my point perfectly - anti .NET "racism" at its finest :) If - say - some Perl dev with academia background was ignorant of VCS, he'd just be a bad developer and that's it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the comments: "Why do people have to "leave" technologies? Why can't they just add new technologies to their arsenals without dramatic quitting blog posts? You don't see musicians who have just learned to play the guitar writing "why I'm leaving the piano" posts. Go is great; Node.js is great; some JVM languages are fine; .NET has a hell of a lot going for it too. Evaluate your options at the start of every project and use the best tool for the job at hand."

<comment><USER5> Amusingly, in his "Why I love Go" [0] linked from that article he discusses using the right tool for the job:

> Instead, this about the right tool for the job. (Could you imagine > woodworkers getting into heated arguments about whether a screwdriver or > hammer was better?)

That would be about as insane as a woodworker writing a blog post about 'leaving the screwdriver' :)

[0] [http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/why-i-love- go/](http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/why-i-love-go/)

<comment><USER6> You do realize that computer programs and languages are not screwdrivers and hammers, right? We're talking about a world where screwdrivers and hammers _both_ claim to allow you to efficiently drive nails and screw screws. It is very possible for one to be strictly better than the other, and not even unlikely that one is better in most common situations.

I know "the right tool for the job" is some sort of unchallengeable divine hacker slogan, but I've never seen that slogan solve a problem. So maybe it isn't the right tool for _this_ job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this post is interesting, but mostly at this point useful as a frame of reference for all the changes that have happened in the .NET ecosystem in 2 years. For example, the server produced by the ASP.NET team (Kestrel) has now been benchmarked at over 300K req/s, and it's using libuv under the hood as an event-based IO engine. That's also not to mention that Mono has benefited tremendously from the new open-source nature of the entire .NET framework, and is a far more viable portability story for .NET than it ever has been (although it still has its pain points). Soon enough, Microsoft will have its own port of CoreCLR for Linux.

Also, relatedly, I think this post is also mostly about the characteristics of the .NET _community_ and its culture, and less about technology. The aforementioned recent changes are indicative of substantial growth and diversification of that community, and I think likely heralds a lot more good changes to come.

<comment><USER8> > Soon enough, Microsoft will have its own port of CoreCLR for Linux.

CoreCRL alerady runs on Linux -- it's all very much beta though.

</comment></comment><comment> Const-me "traditional Windows devs are typically only good at Windows" — why? I developed for Windows, Nintendo, iOS, OSX…

"NIX guys on the other hand are typically familiar with multiple operating systems" Nope, they aren't familiar with Windows. Just an example, I only see *nix developers started using I/O completion ports (which is the best I/O strategy for a Windows network servers since Windows NT 3.51) only couple of years ago, in node.js and libuv. Before that, most Windows ports of cross- platform servers failed miserably.

"The typical, multi-threaded paradigms in C, Java, and C#" — for C#, those typical multi-threaded paradigm has changed in 2011-2012 with the release of TPL, Rx, async-await.

<comment><USER9> I have to agree with the author: the Window's guy are usually the ones focused on Window's only solutions. Like, for example, a Windows admin having not heard of nmap. This is common.

<comment> Const-me Сould you please estimate what share of *nix admins have heard about VBScript, PowerShell, WMI or group policy?

<comment><USER9> I think you would find most unix admins know of those things. Powershell is your bash, WMI is your /proc. VBScript and group policy would be things you come across if you work with Samba.

<comment> Const-me "Powershell is your bash" — Cmd.exe is your bash. Powershell doesn't process text streams, it operates on .NET CLR objects. PowerShell by itself is more like interactive python shell. But it's power isn't language or interpreter, but the amount of things exposed to that language.

"WMI is your /proc" — also ifconfig, /var/log, /etc/fstab, /etc/network/interfaces, and a lot more, and with remote access.

"VBScript and group policy would be things you come across if you work with Samba" — completely unrelated. VBScript is more or less your Perl, but again with lots of things exposed to the language (besides WMI, there are ADSI, CDO, etc).

AFAIK there's nothing in *nix world resembling group policy.

"most unix admins know of those things" — you see? Most unix admins know almost nothing of those things. So why do you expect a Windows admin should know about nmap? On Windows, people usually use other tools instead of nmap, e.g. netstat, portqry, and tcpview.

<comment><USER9> We can elaborate on those all day, but I nailed the gist of it and you know it.

<comment><USER9> VBScript would be something a Samba admin would know of due to VBS being used often for login scripts. Netlogon is a share you would have on your Samba server. Group policy is distributed over SMB. Is this news to you?

<comment> Const-me "VBScript would be something a Samba admin would know of" — a login script doesn't have to be a VBScript, could be CMD as well, or just an EXE. WSH is a general-purpose scripting environment unrelated to samba. Professional Windows system engineers use VBScript to automate their tasks, or at least they did before Win7 took off, with the PowerShell built-in.

"Group policy is distributed over SMB" — SMB indeed takes part in the distribution, however LDAP protocol plays key role here: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/canberrapfe/archive/2012/11/15/where...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/canberrapfe/archive/2012/11/15/where- are-site-linked-group-policy-objects-stored-and-why-should-you-care.aspx) Also it's less important how they distributed or linked, it's more important what they are — and AFAIK there's no *nix equivalent.

<comment><USER9> You gotta be trolling me. Have fun.

<comment> Const-me I ain't trolling. Your problem is, you know almost nothing about Windows, but you pretend you do.

You don't even know there's no VBScript in Word. The language you wrote you Word macros in 90-s was called VBA = Visual Basic for Applications. Compared to VBScript, it even have different syntax, and of course, they serve different purpose: while VBS is for system engineers, they target VBA towards office users. BTW, I coded both in 90-s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > C# is awesome. I think it's a spectacular language.

OCaml, Haskell and Lisp are spectacular. Erlang is spectacular. Tcl and Python are spectacular. C# is an OK-language at best.

> I'm not aware of any non-Java JVM languages prior to the CLR [...]

Except JVM/Java had JPython, JRuby, and Rhino (JavaScript) earlier. Those are interpreted, sure, but they were running inside JVM and talking to Java code already when .NET was first published. The compilation to JVM bytecode is a minor implementation detail.

<comment><USER11> > OCaml, Haskell and Lisp are spectacular. Erlang is spectacular. Tcl and > Python are spectacular. C# is an OK-language at best.

C# not only has built-in monad comprehensions, it can straightforwardly simulate type classes/traits (which even F# can't do). It also has a _full metaobject protocol_ for handling (extreme) late binding, and a good concurrency story (though I rather prefer the Actor Model).

Really, C# only pretends to be a blue-collar language.

<comment><USER12> > C# not only has built-in monad comprehensions

IIRC linq is just a structural transformation. Most languages can define monadic instances, that's not the difficulty (or the value)

> it can straightforwardly simulate type classes

Without HKT?

> it can straightforwardly simulate traits

by copy/pasting extension methods?

> It also has a full metaobject protocol

you can change the inheritance tree of a C# object at runtime?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been on two interviews recently, and both saw experience in .NET as a negative. I found myself having to down-play experience in .NET in both cases, in order to guide the discussion toward more applicable skills for the role. Even when you may be a polyglot programmer, interviewers tend to label you as .NET or Microsoft. Which, has apparently become a bad thing. Unless you're interviewing with a Fortune-100 company, in which case, .NET is still somewhat popular.

<comment><USER14> I would think twice about joining an organization that thinks negatively of your former experience in a different stack. Sure, they may not be relevant to the job at hand, but good programmers will write good code in whatever stack they have to work in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Author states "Using the Disruptor (a lock-free ring buffer on the JVM), you can easily process 20M+ events per second. On .NET using ordained "best practices" anything more than a dozen transactions per second is considered decent-to-good performance and at that point, you just need bigger/better/more hardware."

WTF? This is inane.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, he's comparing one of the best optimized ring buffers on the JVM to actual transactions, that's one of the worst comparisons I've ever seen. I've shipped large scale systems on .NET and on the JVM, the issues you run into with .NET are that windows isn't as easy to administer IMO as linux variants, and your ecosystem isn't as strong, that's about it.

.NET doesn't have a runtime profiler that will deoptimize / recompile etc., which can cause slowdowns in certain use cases, it does have a better unsafe story, and value types, and reified generics which can make things faster for you.

<comment><USER17> OP here. I still really like the Disruptor style. You're right, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that he didn't mention the core idea of this piece that got a fair amount of attention: [http://www.aaronstannard.com/the-profound-weakness-of- the-ne...](http://www.aaronstannard.com/the-profound-weakness-of-the-net-oss- ecosystem/)

Namely, hat .NET developers don't really solve any hard problems

<comment> UK-AL Ironically I think there a lot of distributed platforms for .net.

NServiceBus, MassTransit. Akka.net, Orleans, etc

<comment><USER19> The author who write that blog post is actually one of the co-founders of Akka.NET, which was created before Orleans was out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr version - it's mostly about the portability, shortcomings of Windows as OS, and accompanying software (VS, TFS, IIS, MSSQL etc) being bloated. Zero critics about the .NET framework itself.

<comment><USER21> It's interesting to see how many of the critiques the author cited in 2013 no longer apply to the .NET ecosystem. To name a few:

* Git is now a first class VCS for use with Visual Studio

* .NET development no longer tied to Visual Studio thanks to things like VS Code or OmniSharp with Submline

* .NET development no longer tied to Windows, dev with a Mac or Linux using .NET core

<comment><USER17> OP here. My concerns have been or are being addressed. We're still a ways off from having things solid on Windows and Linux. All things considered, I'm happy with Satya's leadership of Microsoft over the last few years.

<comment><USER22> I only wonder how far these new attitudes will seep into the general .NET developer culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Outdated. Microsoft has clearly embraced open source, and is facilitating cross-platform .NET development (OmniSharp, ASP.NET 5). Async is a thing. SQL Server is not a con, switch to something else. Mono is reason to leave mono, not .NET.

<comment><USER17> OP here. The post was written 2 years ago before async/await were a thing and .NET only worked on Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The best language is the one that can get your job done and for which you are able to hire competent developers.

<comment><USER25> PHP?

<comment><USER26> Competent developers can be good in _any_ language. Bad developers are bad _regardless of language_.

You don't hear people say things like "Oh, that guy was an amazing <language> developer, and could build awesome, solid easy-to-read and high-performance code, but his <other_language> code is so bad nothing short of a complete rewrite can help".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find I agree with the author on the details of his argument yet have reached a different conclusion.

Dude. It's not .NET -- it's the Windows/SQL Server/VS/etc toolchain. Dump the toolchain and work on linux in Mono. Yes, it is a second-class citizen. But even then, it's a hell of a bag of goodies for free.

I got really tired of the MS ecosystem as well. And I feel for those still stuck in it. But why would I want to ditch the CLR, a big honking beast of code that is being tested billions of times daily? Why give up all the libraries created by devs all over the world?

I went with F# and mono and am really happy with it. If I need database support, I pick up something off the shelf. Simply because I use .NET doesn't make me a prisoner of .NET-think.

<comment><USER17> OP here. You're correct that most of the problems were related to the toolchain and Windows.

I did a lot of work using Mono for over a year. After submitting dozens and dozens of bug reports and pull requests to the project, I finally had to get some work done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Non-Java JVM languages have been part of the Java ecosystem sincw the beginning, from Pizza and Kawa on forward. Maybe .NET made more developers comfortable with that, but I think it had more to do with that the JVM enjoys HUGE cross-platform library support, solving the bootstrapping problem for getting a new language out there and used.

</comment><comment><USER29> After reading about halfway through this I scrolled to the bottom to look for the punch line but there was none. This article comes off as the frustrations of a developer who was forced to use Windows and didn't like it (Boo hoo). A lot of the "issues" he had left me scratching my head and a lot of the observations he's made seem to be very anecdotal.

> As covered previously, Windows is not a good player when it comes to > network-based server software.

What is the definition of "network--based server software"? His "as covered previously" article doesn't even contain the word network in it, so it's really unclear what he's complaining about to begin with.

> One other really big problem I see with Windows is that traditional Windows > devs are typically only good at Windows and get lost very quickly outside of > their comfort zones, which is not true for Linux devs.

That's an anecdotal observation at best. In my opinion most developers have comfort zones and get lost very quickly outside of them. The difference between a good developer and a great developer is that the great developer doesn't back down from a challenge outside their comfort zone and are willing to learn new things in-depth.

I know plenty of good developers who are only good in their language of choice and have no interest in moving outside of that tool-chain. I've worked with plenty of PHP and Ruby developers who deployed to Linux and they didn't know their ass from a hole in the wall regardless of their OS of choice. I've also worked with a few Linux C/C++ developers on some projects and they had a very thin understanding of C#, often coding things from scratch that were built into the language. Not to mention their love of nested loops. I've also worked with some amazing OSX developers who had the same level of comfort on Linux that I do and were about as comfortable in Windows as I was on OSX (i.e. better than average). But none of that matters because it's all anecdotal.

> I had a Core i7 3770K 3.5GHZ desktop I built with 16 GB of RAM and a Vertex > 4 512 GB SSD. It literally maxed out the Windows Experience Index and > Windows + VS was still slow.

I HAVE a Core i7 Q820 1.73Ghz laptop issued by work with 20 GB of RAM and a Seagate Momentus 320GB HDD with McAfee software based full disk encryption. It literally has a Windows Experience Index of 5.9 and Windows + VS IS perfectly fine.

I'm really not sure what he's done to his system, maybe he forgot to mention that he was running Windows 7 in a VM on Linux and everything down to the disk was virtualized and there was no hardware acceleration. I see no other reason why his performance would be intolerable.

> Now I dev on a MacBook Pro which has less CPU horsepower than my beefy > desktop and things are noticebly faster and the UX is infinitely better > after a small learning curve.

Seriously? Linux is better than Windows because you use a MacBook Pro and OSX's UI is better than Windows? Is that's what you're arguing?

It's at this point that I stopped reading and scrolled to the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER30> I began writing C# in 2004. I've been writing it since for business and pleasure. Since Microsoft began adopting a more open source approach, it's been, well, amusing to see the open source culture collide with has been historically a closed system.

"Why isn't there a free, open package that solves hard problem X, it's 2015 after all. How preposterous!" The naivety displayed in these kinds of statements is amusing. There are probably many solutions to hard problem X locked away in proprietary "Microsoft Shop" code bases around the world. It's incredibly daft to assume otherwise. Does this approach lead to a lot of duplicated effort- yes; are there a lot of hacked together half working solutions out there- yes; has the .NET community been ok with this- yes. As is the culture of .NET. It's the fine art of not giving a shit because you're going to get paid anyways.

"Oh these poor .NET bastards, they're just sooo clueless of the world around them; they only know Windows." I'm sure this could be said of just about anyone. All tech stacks have their stars and fry cooks. As with many things, it's a matter of how you want to dedicate your time. Could I spend my time focused on file system design, memory issues, and network architectures. Absolutely! It's great that people enjoy this stuff; I personally don't. It's boring to me same reason I don't enjoy futzing around with Linux. I don't care about how it works; just that it does work. When I write for the .NET/C# stack, my focus is on the business problem. How do I impact the end-user (ie Shannon over in accounting, or little Timmy dipshit in Iowa) in a positive way.

"VS also has this really nasty habit of creating "csproj" and "sln" files. I hate those things." this is like bitching about make files. It's beyond silly. Could it be improved- probably, does it need to be- no. I think make files are a horrible way to do things, do I bitch about it- no. I understand that that is the preferred approach of the environment. Learn what I need to do to make it work and get on with my day. And really, these types of complaints are just childish. You're a professional. Deal with it.

As far as IIS is concerned, we can have a ceremonial burning of the source code one day. That product is beyond useless.

The selling point of C#/.NET isn't it's community- it's its productivity. A company can hire a small team of developers and they can crank out a bunch of code in short order to solve some specific problem. The code will be written the ".NET way" not because that's what's best for performance, but because that's what's best for development. Same thing happens in other technology stacks. Code is written to follow a well followed pattern by its community so that new hires and other developers can quickly suss out what's going on without having to stop and think. It's the same song and dance of using third- party libraries. Bit like a royale with cheese instead of a big-mac. Dress it up different, but the same principles are at play.

Fundamentally, there's going to be some cultural exchange between the traditional .NET crowd and the open source crowd. Both parties stand to learn a lot from one another, and have lots of opportunities to discover overlap. Rather than throwing in the towel and saying .NET is bullshit and used by dullards who solve inconsequential problems is short sighted. Find a place for .NET in your stack, look for opportunities to mix it in with your existing open source technologies. If you can't find a spot for it, then move on to whatever works for you. It's not rocket science.

</comment><comment><USER31> "In fact, I don't even use a mouse anymore--my hands are always on the keyboard or trackpad and I can gesture to my computer and actually have it respond--unlike Windows."

I use a keyboard all day with Windows. I can do every single thing that I need to do with just the keyboard, no problem.

I also use Gnome 3 and OS X and I honestly don't think keyboard support is as good in either of those. So I am sure that I don't know what this gentleman is talking about.</comment>


PS3 Media Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.montuori.net/ps3-media-server/ <comment><AUTHOR> great way to share movies to ps3

<comment><USER2> I am fairly confident that this post no longer applies to the PS3 as the PS3 Media Server project doesn't exist. You can however do the same thing with mediatomb.</comment></comment>